Word: saratoga
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...115th meeting of horse racing's venerable summer camp at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., opened earlier this month as regular fans returned to their favorite spa. Once again hotels and restaurants are jammed with people who seem to have leaped straight out of New Yorker cartoons, and the jewel thieves who shadow the wealthy have put in their usual appearance. It would seem that nothing could disturb these genteel August rites...
Those with a hankering to hear, say, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or his Fourth Piano Concerto this summer not only could encounter these works at Ravinia, where Beethoven runs rampant, but could scarcely avoid them elsewhere: in upstate New York at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra (during its Beethoven festival); at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony's Berkshire retreat (during an all-Beethoven orchestral weekend); and at the Hollywood Bowl (during the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Beethoven festival). Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Los Angeles are each playing Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra...
...their gusty enthusiasms and fads. Because collecting performances is addictive, all dance fans, however august, have a little of the groupie in them, and Croce is no exception. She observes herself falling into a groupie's shorthand way of burbling about the New York City Ballet: "The Great Saratoga Chaconne; The Diamonds of Saturday Night Closing Weekend." There is a witty tribute to groupies called "Ballet Alert," about the New York telephone service that tells fans of last-minute program and cast switches. The service, run by a voluble woman named Carmel Capehart, depends on information from inner circles...
Smith was most at home at the race track, even as "a slightly bewildered Yank" visiting Ascot. "Half the royal family was on the premises," he writes in 1960, "and horseplayers were being so polite their teeth hurt." He savors "the soft afternoons under the old elms of Saratoga" and the memories of great races, like the 1941 Preakness: "Whirlaway came loping along counting the house with Arcaro sitting still as a bluepoint on the half-shell." To Smith, horses are people with four legs and wonderful names. What a pleasure to learn that a colt by the French stallion...
...after Driver Peter Woelfel coolly ordered his 16 passengers out, a 53-car freight train tore through the crossing, smashing the bus in two. Forty-foot waves and winds of up to 90 m.p.h. along the Atlantic Coast raised fears of another oil-rig disaster. Operators of the Zapata Saratoga rig, anchored 110 miles off Nantucket Island, asked the Coast Guard to evacuate 50 of its workers; luckily, the storm abated and the rescue operation was called...